editors
JERRY BECK (LA)
AMID AMIDI (NY)
Welcome to Cartoon Brew 2.5
September 5, 2008 12:38 am


Welcome to our updated look. As the title of this post implies, this is not a complete overhaul. Rather it’s a refresh of the existing site. We liked the site we already had (designed by Also) so we asked designer and tech guru Rob Kohr to retain the core of that design while enhancing functionality and adding new features. Some of the additions are:

* View Posts by Author: This gives you the option to read posts by a specific Brewmaster. Once our guest Brewers start adding content, you will also have the option to view their specific posts.

* Guest Brewers: This is among our most exciting new additions. We’re making an effort to bring new voices to the animation conversation by inviting some of the art form’s leading figures to blog alongside us. We chose our guest bloggers based on the following critera: people (a.) who have made significant contributions to the art of animation; (b.) who we both respect and admire; (c.) who are interesting and have something to say; and (d.) who have never blogged before. We couldn’t be more pleased with our first trio of Guest Brewers: Linda Simensky, Eric Goldberg and PES, who respectively specialize in TV, Feature and Short Films/Commercials. All three of them are extremely busy so they won’t be posting as frequently as us, but we look forward to hearing from them whenever they have a chance.

* Enhanced Search: All search results now load chronologically in a handy Cartoon Brew-formatted page, instead of redirecting to cumbersome Google link pages.

* Event Listings: A handy guide to upcoming animation-related events is now available in our right-hand column.

* Related Posts: On each individual post page, there are links to additional posts on similar topics.

* Weighted Tags: The sizes of the tags are now dynamically proportional to the amount of posts in each category. So now you can see which topics we write about most frequently. We are also in the process of adding new categories to help make navigation easier.

* Cartoon Brew TV: Our most ambitious new feature, Brew TV, is still in the works. This will launch on September 15. We’re truly excited about expanding the Cartoon Brew name and we think you’ll be too once you see what we have in store.

If you run across bugs or if something isn’t working the way you want, let us know in the comments. We’ll be tweaking the site throughout the weekend to get it right.

Thank you to all of our faithful readers who visit and support Cartoon Brew. We love this art form, and we’re thrilled to be able to share our passion with people who feel just as strongly about cartoons as we do. Together we will continue to lead the animation conversation. Enjoy the new site!

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Charlie says:
09/5/08  1:09am

Its slightly different!

 
Bitter Animator says:
09/5/08  2:02am

Sounds like some good stuff coming. Especially looking forward to the guest bloggers.

Just so you know though – the Brewmasters thing with your names on it have always been a bit funny on my browser (IE 7 I think, on a laptop) – the names are never aligned in the box and still aren’t. As far as I can see, the site is run by RRY BECK and AMID AMIDI. That could well be more about my browser than your site but just thought I’d let you know.

 
William Chappell says:
09/5/08  2:07am

Ooh… fancy!

 
Alexandra Cronkite says:
09/5/08  2:12am

I like the touch of weighted tags. I find them to be extremely helpful. Great job.

 
Tim Rauch says:
09/5/08  4:25am

great choice of guest brewers, definitely looking forward to their posts. thanks for keeping the brew awesome!

 
Dan says:
09/5/08  5:50am

So, whatever happened to Cartoon Brew Films? It seems to have disappeared completely.

 
Keith Paynter says:
09/5/08  6:04am

First of all, welcome aboard to the newest brewers. Looking forward to CBTV, as those of us who are too far away miss CB Films and the Cartoon Dump online shows. CB is the “good cop, bad cop” of the animation blogosphere – keep it coming.

(P.S. there’s definitely a formatting issue with that ‘Brewmasters’ box – You can see the missing text when highlighted by dragging the mouse…Ah, HTML tables…)

 
Aaron H. Bynum says:
09/5/08  6:05am
 
FP says:
09/5/08  6:36am

Can’t say it looks a lot different.

You should check your logs to see how many FIREFOX users visit the BREW. Most FIREFOX users have ADBLOCK PLUS installed, sometimes with optional filtersets. I have that setup, along with custom filters, so CARTOON BREW looks like THIS.

 
Amitav Roy says:
09/5/08  6:42am

I follow your site for my interest in animation and cartoons, and the updates sounds good — although they are more of the technical part. But I guess to run a good working website they are required also. Thanks to your design team and the tech guru. Thanks again for the content.

 
Mr Helpful says:
09/5/08  8:18am

Hey, Bitter… same thing was happening to me, so I cleared my browser’s cache (not History, but the cache) and everything is fixed now.

Hope this helps!

 
mike r baker says:
09/5/08  8:48am

What FP said.

I have Firefox and looked none too good. I decided to see what it looked like in IE and it looks great! But I don’t use IE. Looks great in the new Google Chrome browser though.

 
readersahoy says:
09/5/08  9:19am

I have the same box cutoff problem in Safari-weird. A lot of readers use macs, fyi.

 
david says:
09/5/08  9:21am

is CBTV gonna be different from CBfilms? or is it new and improved CBfilms?

 
Elmer says:
09/5/08  9:35am

“If you run across bugs”

I’ll let you know when I see him..

 
Mr Helpful says:
09/5/08  10:19am

Again, to you Firefox folk up there… Try deleting your cache. I’m running Firefox with NoScript and doing so fixed my strangely cut-off boxes–my display looked just like FP before I did it.

 
Ken Priebe says:
09/5/08  10:28am

Yay Cartoon Brew! Looks great!

 
Kat says:
09/5/08  10:38am

This “Brew TV” thing sounds pretty sweet…..

 
Stanislav says:
09/5/08  10:58am

It’s a matter of time until Cartoon Brew becomes a full-fledged broadcast network!

 
ridgecity says:
09/5/08  11:38am

Excellent! looks nice without those giant rehauls most websites like to do.

maybe you can add some of the film festivals that accept animation around the world to the “coming up events” since there’s a ton of stuff we rarely get to hear about…

 
Ross says:
09/5/08  12:56pm

The site looks great, can’t wait to read the the stuff by the new guest contributors.

Keep up the good work fellas.

 
vvek says:
09/5/08  3:53pm

dont like the tags part, the organised simple tag board was the best…bring it back pls..

 
mike r baker says:
09/5/08  4:36pm

Looks perfect in Firefox now. Great work!

 
Danny R. Santos says:
09/5/08  5:58pm

Does this mean we get to post some of artwork?

 
Danny R. Santos says:
09/5/08  6:04pm

I mean our artwork

 
Ira Owens says:
09/5/08  8:30pm

labyrinthbanner_a.gif

Annoying as hell.

 
Zekey says:
09/6/08  1:27am

This redesign seems to translate to “everything is 3 times wider now”
Oh well.

 
Bitter Animator says:
09/6/08  2:18am

Thanks for the suggestion, Mr. Helpful. Unfortunately it didn’t solve it for me but it was worth a shot.

 
Shaw says:
09/6/08  7:13pm

This really sounds promising (even a Twitter?? Nice!)

I’m looking forward to the 2.5!

 
William Chappell says:
09/7/08  12:56am

Also, Jerry and Amid’s comments are in red, which is actually really helpful.

 
amid says:
09/7/08  8:33pm

David asked, “is CBTV gonna be different from CBfilms? or is it new and improved CBfilms?”

There are similarities, but some of the major differences from CBFilms are that CBTV is FREE and we’re doing it on a regular weekly schedule. We’ll reveal details next week.

 
pspector says:
09/8/08  8:54am

Won’t load fully on IE6. Hangs my browser.

 
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